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Georgia Senate committee to take on possible AI legislation

Photo by Sergi Kabrera on Unsplash

A committee of Georgia legislators is tackling the thorny issues surrounding artificial intelligence.

The Georgia Senate Study Committee on AI met for the first time last week. The group consists of state senators along with experts from the academic and corporate worlds.

Senator John Albers, a Republican from Roswell, chairs the committee.

"These are the things that are evolving and and part of the reason we have to change the law oftentimes is it was built in a different time and day and these things didn't exist," Albers said, recalling that one of the first bills he worked on as a freshman legislator removed the word "telegraph" from parts of the Georgia code.

During the meeting, Senate staff told committee members that the first step towards regulating AI in Georgia should be the passage of data privacy protections. Some 18 states have comprehensive data privacy laws. In Georgia, a bill protecting data privacy was introduced in 2022, but failed to go anywhere.

Only one state, Colorado, has attempted to regulate AI. Its law is a fairly narrow one which targets the use of AI in decision-making for things like loan applications and employment.

Martin Matheny is WUGA's Program Director and a host and producer of our local news program 'Athens News Matters.' He started at WUGA in 2012 as a part-time classical music host and still hosts WUGA's longest-running local program 'Night Music' which is heard on WUGA and GPB Classical. He lives in Normaltown with his wife, Shaye and dog, Murphy.